Movie Tab II

This is widely 'available' by now. It has been since Christmas, as my folder indicates that's when I 'acquired' it. I still have to watch it though.

I do not understand you and your devil language. By the way, nice trips.

>13666

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"Loves them? They need them, like they need the air."

Machete -

This film was just ok. Some decent moments, some very cheesy moments. Can't say I would recommend it, but it was a decent watch. A few decent action scenes and some nice special effects. None of the performances stood out really, although I do think DeNiro was one of the better ones in the film, with a nod to Jeff Fahey as well.

Grown Ups -

This was about what I expected. Not great, not horrible. If you're in the mood for some laughs, I've seen worse recent comedies.

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"I know, honey. Look at the map. We go your way, that's about four inches. We go my way, it's an inch and a half. You wanna pay for the extra gas?"

True Grit (1969, Hathaway) -

Thought I would finally get around to seeing this film as I have been anticipating the Coen Brothers remake. I thoroughly enjoyed this film! John Wayne and Kim Darby gave great performances, the only disappointment in this film was Glen Campbell, but that really shouldn't be a shock to anyone. The cinematography was well done as was the writing. I should preface this by saying I haven't read the book, but intend to at some point. I was a little leery going in because of the G rating, but that's because when I think of westerns, I don't generally think of them as a 'G' genre. I would definitely recommend this film! I'm looking forward to seeing how the Coen Brothers version compares.

Cache (2005) –
Didn’t quite match up to most of the praise that it’d been given, but I still found it enjoyable. The main character is detailed enough, but I didn’t find anything about him terribly interesting, and I thought the film’s preeminent dilemma lost some steam about halfway through with the ambiguous focus on the main character’s guilt.

Cypher (2002) –
It has plenty of ingredients that could easily be used to make a run-of-the-mill thriller, but with a unique fusion of the sci-fi and noir genres, and an amalgam of classy and frenetic style, it’s difficult to see where the script feels a little clichéd.

Vincenzo Natali, the film’s director, seems to have something of a knack for creative sci-fi, and his specialty of bizarre atmosphere is in full display here.

Too lazy to do write-ups for these:
Deep Red (1975) -
eXistenZ (1999) – -
The Fifth Element (1997) – +
Gamer (2009) –
The Hurt Locker (2008) –
Silent Hill (2006) –
Terminator Salvation (2009) –

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Way behind, so I'll just list the one I saw last night:

Novocaine


Kinda off and never really seems to commit to being suspenseful or larger-than-life. Gets an average rating because I admired the way the ending came together.

Predators (2010) -

This was better than I expected, then again, I wasn't expecting much. I thought this was shot pretty well. There were some good performances throughout, Brody wasn't great, but was better than I expected. Fishburne's character was weird, not quite sure if I liked him or not. I understand the necessity of his character but felt the writing for his character was mundane. To be fair, most of the writing was mundane , but that's not really what you watch this type of movie for. It provided a few decent action scenes, but one thing I thought it lacked was some of the suspense of the original.

Watched these over the past 2 days:


Terms of Endearment:


Chariots of Fire:


Manhattan: +


Caravaggio:


Somewhere: +

Small Time Crooks -

I enjoyed this film a lot, Woody Allen's character was one of my favorites so far of his films that I have seen. Tracy Ullman also gave a great performance. The sets and costumes were great, loved some of the outfits Allen and Ullman wore in the film. For those who enjoy Woody Allen, I would definitely recommend Small Time Crooks if you haven't seen it yet.

The Last Song

A Miley Cyrus vehicle written by Nicholas Sparks- that says it all, really.

Rebellious yet musically talented Ronnie (of course she's musically talented- it's Miley Cyrus!) and her younger brother (Bobby Coleman, who is not that bad) go to live with their father (Greg Kinnear) and play on pretty beaches. Ronnie falls in love with local hottie and rich boy Will Blakelee (Liam Hemsworth, who is Miley's new BF in real life). Melodrama and predictability throughout.

Ronnie is possibly the biggest Mary Sue character ever. She reads Anna Karenina on the beach! As of course, all rebellious teens do! This is so Sparks can pretend that the film is a profound exploration of the novel's famous opening line: "Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". Miley acquits herself well enough, suggesting that more films of this ilk starring her may folllow.

The story is unconvincing and trite- but who needs a sophisticated and provocative film when you've got Miley Cyrus? The 'daddy's girl' aspect of Miley's persona is put to full use here. Like Miley or not, she does what she does well.

Watch if you like Miley or you want a melodrama to watch with your pre-teen/early teen girlfriends.

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You cannot have it both ways. A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love can never be a great dancer. Never. (The Red Shoes, 1948)

Quartet

This film has all the Merchant and Ivory positive and negative attributes.

The story is slight: Marya, the wife of a Polish convict (Isabelle Adjani) moves in with the Heidlers, an older English couple consisting of seductive brute H.J (Alan Bates) and his artist wife Lois (Maggie Smith). H.J's affair with Marya is not his first and Lois simply has to put up with it all. It's an adaptation of a Jean Rhys novel, which is partly autobiographical. Because the novel gives an insight into Marya's conflicted feelings about her situation, Adjani can only hope to hint at what lies beneath. Physically she is spot on but Marya is supposed to be an outsider in Paris and the fact that Adjani is French undermines this. There are many conversations in French and at times it appears to be a French film with extracts of English as opposed to the other way around. Adjani is not a bad actress but her accent means that the intonations of some dialogue is a little off.

Alan Bates also is physically spot on- just the sort of man that would crush a 'crushed petal' like Marya. He captures Heidler's brutishness but also his attractiveness. You can understand why women might fall for him.

I associate Maggie Smith with more conservative roles and although she is a good actress, she does not entirely convince as a bohemienne artist. However she pulls off Lois's brave front and housewife delusion beautifully.

The aesthetic of the film really captures the zeitgeist of the period, which Merchant and Ivory almost always manage to do- but the film is killed by very slow pacing. The scenes with Adjani visiting her convinct husband (Anthony Higgins) are dull and the slow pacing kills off the claustrophobic hothouse atmosphere that the film should have.

The film had potential but poor pacing and uncertain direction (the ending just sort of drifts) means that the film is more of a curiosity for those interested in Merchant and Ivory or the actors.

127 Hours is an excellent film, and a master lesson in how to make a film that holds peoples attention even though it's based on one single static event involving one person. James Franco puts his all into playing Aron. Very well recommended even if you don't fancy sitting through the gruesome bits they're aren't actually that bad and strangely even though we all know that's the shocking climax of the film, Aron's mental state is the actual base of the story. Having read the chapter of the book where he describes cutting off his arm, that's way, way more horrific than it was on film which only goes to show you the power of the written word and the imagination.

Well recommended 8.5/10

Is it as good as Touching The Void?

hmm no, not quite imo. I think the cold in Touching the Void gives another dimension that makes survival that much more extraordinary. As film making tho they're both excellent. Aron does come across as a little annoying, a self confident, self centred individual but that's probably the strength that made him survive and gave him stuff to think about.

Pygmalion
A film based on the George Bernard Shaw play, which many will know in a more famous version that I will be reviewing next.

It's a great little play. Colonel Pickering (Scott Sunderland) makes a bet with his friend and fellow phonetics teacher Professor Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard). Can Higgins pass off common flower girl Eliza Doolittle (Wendy Hillier) as a lady by teaching her how to speak in the proper manner? The play is on one level a comedy of manners, but it raises questions about misogyny, class struggles, and the dangers of treating people as scientific subjects. A Doll's House may be more commonly cited as a 19th century example of feminism but Pgymalion handles the whole thing with more flair, and is ultimately more successful.

Theatre lesson over, it's time to get down to the film. Howard makes an adorable Higgins- an eternal bachelor whose wit and intellect is impeccable but his skills with women leave much to be desired. One longs for him to get over his idiocy- we really root for this character, which in some sense is a flaw. Higgins is ultimately cruel in his selfishness. Whether this is his fault or not, Higgins is really an anti-hero. However Howard does show Higgins process of falling in love (the play gets its title from a myth in which a sculptor falls in love with his sculpture and asks for her to be made mortal) very nicely. It's romantic without being completely out of place for the character.

Hillier's accent as flower girl Eliza is so awful on the ears that one can hardly wait for Higgins to rid her of it. What ought to come across as a "common" but strangely charming accent comes off as pure screeching. But overall Hillier does do a good job and has chemistry with Howard.

It's hard to watch this film without thinking of My Fair Lady. Whether this is a backward statement or not, Pygmalion the film does not really differ or add much to the knowledge of the story from the musical, except that it has more of a romantic slant. If you've seen My Fair Lady, you've seen this film with songs. The quality of Pygmalion means that this should not deter you from watching it- in fact, I recommend doing so- but the idea that this film is "infinitely superior" to the musical is flawed.

My Fair Lady

One of the greatest musicals ever, the critics seem to mar its reputation by asserting that the fact that it is a musical makes it inferior to the film adaptation of the original play. Ignore the critics because this film takes the solid basis of Pygmalion and gives it the charm, warmth and romance that only a musical can give.

Plot and script-wise, it does not really differ from Pygmalion, except for the fact that it's almost three hours long and has a lot of singing in it. Rex Harrison's speak-singing as Henry Higgins allows the wit of the lyrics to shine through. Harrison strikes a good balance between Higgins the jolly tease and Higgins the sexist snob. One never believes that Higgins is intentionally cruel but watching Audrey Hepburn's Eliza, his actions have that effect.

Audrey Hepburn makes a wonderful Eliza. Even though her vocals are dubbed in the songs, she is completely charming and "loverly". Her blossoming under Higgins tutelage is a pleasure to watch and her Eliza is slightly more formidable than Wendy Hillier's. The relationship between Eliza and Higgins does not have sexual tension- it's more of a chaste romanticism- but they make a good pair and the lack of sexuality in the relationship means we focus more on the characters as individuals. The aim is not to couple them off together but to witness a transformation.

Freddie, the ardent lover who was played to good comic effect as a simpering sap in Pygmalion, is now a earnest if not thrilling admirer played by Jeremy Brett. He does not pop up much but he sings a wonderful song (or rather, the man who dubs his vocals)- "On the Street Where You Live." Romantics will swoon.

The film is long but never feels dull. You really feel as if you've had a night out at the theatre. For a feel-good film, My Fair Lady is hard to beat.

Update part 1.



The Draughtsman's Contract (Greenaway, 1982)

This is an excellent film which requires multiple viewings simply because it's so crammed with visual details and arch dialog. I've seen it twice now, and there's a lot to like here, as well as a lot I still don't really get. It's a film about an artist and directed by an artist, both of whom seem absorbed in creating rich visual allegories that may defy explanation or even the artist's best intentions. The contract in the title is between a draughtsman and the wife of a rich but sterile land-owner, who is paying the artist 12 sexual encounters for 12 drawings of her husband's estate, to be drawn and exacted while the husband is away on some sort of business. It's not spoiling much to say that it quickly becomes apparent that although the draughtsman is an immoralist and a cad (whith a reputation as a philanderer), the woman (and later her daughter as well) is using him as a stud to produce an heir so she can retain control the family estate. Moreover, someone may be setting him up to draw clues which will be used to frame him for foul play. By the end of the movie you get to hear many of the characters' opinions on painting, marital relations in 1690s Britain, morals, the protestant/catholic conflict, the Irish, Continental vs. English manners, what one of the characters describes as the difference between seeing and "knowing", as well as a host of other topics, but the murder plot and allegorical meaning is frustratingly left out of the narrative frame.

A large part of Peter Greenaway's achievement here is simply in maintaining the baroque 17th century manners and filming the world as though it's recorded by the artist's eye and pen, and there's some great comedy here too, particularly in the draughtsman's absurdly rigid notion of artistic veracity and the verbal baiting between him and the pompous German son-in-law. I get the sense that much of what we see and hear in the movie is an artful deflection in the same way that the characters use their heavily-stylized speech and manners to hide their darker motivations, even when they're revealing all sorts of other information. Whatever the case, even just taken as a study in drawing with an awesome Michael Nyman score this is well worth checking out.

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House (Obayashi, 1977)

Campy horror film that ostentatiously flaunts convention in just about every scene. Some of the visual storytelling is really entertaining, and I particularly like it when Obayashi starts the camera out of frame, moving from a painted background to a "real" one. The story itself is far more conventional and comprehensible than the art-direction, but what held my attention is the focus on mostly-unanxious female virgins being feasted on by a demonic "old maid". This coming out of a country where it's still pretty common for a woman to be considered an old maid if she's not married by the time she's 30. Obayashi and his daughter/co-screenwriter didn't seem to have a subversive agenda with this but I appreciated the deliberate and sometimes clever and self-aware lack of realism in their approach to the world.



Aliens of the Deep (Cameron, 2005)

What may make or break people's access to this IMAX documentary by James Cameron is how high your tolerance for his insistently romantic presentation of natural history is. This includes an ending image almost directly out of Abyss. What I liked was the all-too-brief images taken in dives Cameron orchestrated in deep trenches of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and outlining of the ecosystem based on chemosynthesis rather than photosynthesis. What this means is that deep sea life can be sustained in extremes of heat and cold, without any sunlight but rather taking energy and minerals from released by volcanic ducts. Cameron makes sparing use of images from his dives along with a fairly bombastic account of his collecting a crack team of marine biologists, astronauts and theoretical scientists to dive and speculate on the implications chemosynthesis may have for discovering extra-terrestrial life (for example in the oceans of the moons of Jupiter). The movie feels overlong for the amount of information it contains and didn't completely satisfy my simple desire to look at marine life, but it had some interesting and thoughtful bits as well.



Emotion (Obayashi, 1966)

Short experiment by the director of Hausu, using a loosely narrated story of incest layered on Dracula, but mainly seems to be just an excuse to shoot some friends in imaginative scenes.





Alien (Scott, 1979)

Classic space horror where, contrary to the tagline, space is full of both ambient and abrasive sounds. Impressive art design creates a compellingly speculative cosmology of alien species that seems to have been flattened and ignored in the sequels, which each seem to take place in completely different genres.





Æon Flux (Kusama, 2005)

Another sci-fi movie with a very strong art-design that may to have been unfairly ignored in the negative reviews the film got. Unfortunately that seems to be the one real strength of the movie but it's worth seeing on those merits alone. It really does seem to be a lot more interesting than most sci-fi movies (even many critically/publically acclaimed ones) simply in terms of set design.



World Apartment Horror (Otomo, 1991)

I've wanted to see this for a long time. It's adapted from a manga by Satoshi Kon (Paprika) by fellow manga artist Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira) and the story is about a yakuza underling charged with ridding an apartment building of a group of immigrants within a week. He ends up becoming embroiled in a dim-witted morality/revenge plot when it turns out the building is haunted, and the person causing the haunting may be one of the tennants. Overall I felt it was a pretty average first attempt at live-action film-making by Otomo. I expected the weaknesses, such as unmotivated characters who undergo fitful and poorly explained development, but Otomo's strength as a graphic stylist aren't much use to him here and while the low-budget aesthetic is not bad it's far from what either of its creators has achieved before or since.



Also, on New Years Eve I re-watched Horse Feathers (McLeod, 1932) on TCM as well as catching parts of Monkey Business, Duck Soup, and A Night at the Opera. I don't feel like rating them. Duck Soup is still my favorite of the lot but they're all worth seeing.

I've also seen a bunch of others, including Meet John Doe and Black Swan, which I'll try to write something about in my next post.

Here's the second half of my recent viewing, minus a couple cheesy anime tentacleporn titles (though if people want to hear that as well I don't mind writing comments about it, we try to be equal-opportunity film-appreciators here at linespalsyhenge)...



The Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, 1935)

Really entertaining sequel with a good deal of humor and pathos. What gets me is the really somewhat touching transformation of Frankenstein's monster from a grunting homunculus into a bitter antihero who "loves the dead, hates the living." I also really enjoyed the almost Tod Browning-esque villain in this one, Dr. Pretorius who blackmails and bullies a reluctant Dr. Frankenstein into starting over.



Somehow, even though this time they're building brains from scratch rather than robbing "abnormal" ones, the view of science in this one seems a lot madder.





A Chinese Ghost Story II (Siu-Tung, 1990)

Lame follow-up to the more-engaging Chinese Ghost Story, which both is and isn't a direct sequel to that movie. The bad guy this time is a stock corrupt official who it turns out is actually a papier mache cross between a giant caterpillar and a dragon.





My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Herzog, 2009)

Another one that ended up feeling a bit slow and overlong, this movie is about a man who goes crazy after hearing an inner voice while on a journey in Peru. After moving back in with his mother in California he tries becoming an actor in Greek tragedy that recapitulates what he thinks is his relationship with the gods. This movie has some decent lyrical passages, including Herzog's typically hypnotic sound design, but he's done better films than this. What is interesting is that the main character's apparent transformation came about when he decided not to go on a Herzogian river journey, but I don't think that will mean much to people who haven't already seen at least Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo.





Wise Guys (De Palma, 1986)

Middling comedy about incompetent gangsters that starts picking up towards the end. One of the weakest De Palma films I've seen.





The Murders in Rue Morgue (Florey, 1932)

Cleverly photographed vehicle for Bela Lugosi to play a swarthy, ethnic mid-19th century mad scientist and carnival performer, who will "prove" man's relationship to the apes by abducting beautiful women and giving them fatal injections of primate blood. I don't know what was so effective about the idea ape-human miscegenation to movie audiences but it's all over 1920s/early 1930s horror films and it seems to be connected with something primal and dangerous that we'd better keep in a cage along with "science". In spite of some mild titillation I think it was used to both greater and odder effect in the original King Kong (1933) and Tarzan the Ape Man (1932).



City Hunter (Wong Jing, 1993)

Jackie Chan plays a womanizing private eye on a hijacked cruise ship in this Cantonese comedy adapted from a Japanese comic. I'm not familiar with the tone of the manga but this film has plenty of jokes at the expense of both Americans and Japanese. Many of the gags swing wide and miss but there's enough goofy randomness that it winds up being pretty entertaining.





Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain (Tsui, 1983)

Recently watching House on dvd made me want to go back to this anti-realist wuxia epic by Tsui Hark. When I say it's anti-realist I mean this movie is truly gratuitous with the special effects, and at times it can get kind of exhausting when the plot is so condensed and almost every shot seems like a special-effects shot. The story becomes a convoluted mess by the third act and it's worth noting that it apparently condenses a very long (50-volume) work that really seems to span ages into a 90-minute film, but it starts off cleanly enough, with a color-coded satire of war that almost seems to be a parody of itself. The hero is Yuen Biao (Once Upon a Time in China, Wheels on Meals, The Prodigal Son) as a low-ranking soldier who escapes his army after being sentenced to death because his superiors can't agree on his orders. The first arc of the movie progresses through a series of comically nonsensical battles, but the movie really picks up after the soldier escapes by running down the side of a cliff, only to become embroiled in a supernatural war between factionalized mystic swordsmen (and women) and a "blood demon". It turns out this is the root of all evil in the hearts of men, but the movie gives you plenty of reasons to be skeptical of such a simplistic, quasi-astrological explanation for warfare and, as the hero bluntly points out, even the enlightened forces of good in the movie seem perpetually bogged down in petty disagreements. Some of this is a little callow but for me here is where the overblown cosmology and chaotic script actually work in the movie's favor by keeping you guessing what the point is well after the movie has ended. Once you get past the Tron-ish laser effects the whole production-design is actually pretty brilliant, including a battle riding giant stone elephants in a ice-fortress full of beautiful women, and some fantastic editing and wire-work. The camera-work is consistently exciting and imaginative; where else prior to cg are you going to see one character anchored on the floor while another runs along the ceiling?

I'm giving it a pretty high based on how much I enjoyed it. Anyone remotely interested in old special effects movies should see it, though I don't think it's currently available on dvd.



Black Swan (Aronofsky, 2010)

A dark fantasy/thriller from Aronofsky about an unstable dancer and with some very impressive subjective camerawork that really takes part in the dance. Well worth seeing on the big screen and I found it pretty engaging but based on my first viewing I'm leaning towards a high vs. a lower .



Young Frankenstein (Brooks, 1974)

One of my girlfriend's favorites and easily my favorite Mel Brooks film right now. The movie has some beautiful black and white cinematography, science fiction, and movie humor so there should be something for everyone here.





Meet John Doe (Capra, 1941)

There's a lot I just didn't find very engaging about this movie, particularly in the romance between an all-too-human reporter and the larger-than-life everyman she creates, but Capra really does shoot and edit some lovely scenes. Even the crappy transfer I saw couldn't ruin the effectively-silent final scene. While there's a lot of complexity in Capra's portrayal of the moral/immoral core of America, the heavy-handed speeches made it a bit of a grind for me and the character I found the most sympathetic was the principled bum who just wants to escape the whole movie. That character argues for an idealized view of poverty but hey, I've been celebrating anti-realist films lately.

mark f ties Capra's sentimentalism to Spielberg's and that seems accurate, but Meet John Doe also seems to be a direct ancestor to Network, which (I think) is still one of my favorites. So it's interesting but overall I just didn't enjoy it enough not to give it my lowest passing score.





Time of the Gypsies (Kusturica, 1988)

Perhaps I'll write more about this movie later but it's an impressionistic modern classic and a precursor to Kusturica's Black Cat White Cat (1998). This one is overall the more cinematic and memorable film but it's also painful, even if it has a good deal of humor.

Winter's Bone


I hate to use the word "letdown," because this was a very good film, but I may have had my expectations too high on account of all the praise I'd heard for it. Definitely a showcase for most of the actors involved, and Jennifer Lawrence is particularly good. I like the Ozark noir idea. I feel like it could be a little less meandering in the first half, but it has a "feel" all its own, to the point at which I fully expect to see any number of films that vaguely remind me of it down the line. I tend to think pretty highly of any film that has such a specific tone, to the point at which you feel you know and understand its world an hour in. Pretty impressive stuff.